The importance of forests for sequestering carbon has created widespread interest among land managers for identifying actions that maintain or enhance carbon storage in forests. Managing for forest carbon under changing climatic conditions underscores a need for resources that help identify adaptation actions that align with carbon management. We developed the Forest Carbon Management Menu to help translate broad carbon management concepts into actionable tactics that help managers reduce risk from expected climate impacts in order to meet desired management goals. We describe examples of real-world forest-management planning projects that integrate climate change information with this resource to identify actions that simultaneously benefit forest carbon along with other project goals. These examples highlight that the inclusion of information on climate vulnerability, considering the implications of management actions over extended timescales, and identifying co-benefits for other management goals can reveal important synergies in managing for carbon and climate adaptation.

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Boreal forests are experiencing dramatic climate change, having warmed 1.0°–1.9°C over the last century. Yet forest regeneration practices are often still dictated by a fixed seed zone framework, in which seeds are both harvested from and planted into predefined areas. Our goal was to determine whether seedlings sourced from southern seed zones in Minnesota USA are already better adapted to northerly seed zones because of climate change. Bur oak ( Quercus macrocarpa ) and northern red oak ( Quercus rubra ) seedlings from two seed zones (i.e., tree ecotypes) were planted into 16 sites in two northern seed zones and measured for 3 yr. Our hypotheses were threefold: (1) tree species with more southern geographic distributions would thrive in northern forests where climate has already warmed substantially, (2) southern ecotypes of these species would have higher survival and growth than the northern ecotype in northern environments, and (3) natural selection would favor seedlings that expressed phenotypic and phenological traits characteristic of trees sourced from the more southern seed zone. For both species, survival was high (>93%), and southern ecotypes expressed traits consistent with our climate adaptation hypotheses. Ecotypic differences were especially evident for red oak; the southern ecotype had had higher survival, lower specific leaf area ( SLA ), faster height and diameter growth, and extended leaf phenology relative to the northern ecotype. Bur oak results were weaker, but the southern ecotype also had earlier budburst and lower SLA than the northern ecotype. Models based on the fixed seed zones failed to explain seedling performance as well as those with continuous predictors (e.g., climate and geographical position), suggesting that plant adaptations within current seed zone delineations do align with changing climate conditions. Adding support for this conclusion, natural selection favored traits expressed by the more southern tree ecotypes. Collectively, these results suggest that state seed sourcing guidelines should be reexamined to permit plantings across seed zones, a form of assisted migration. More extensive experiments (i.e., provenance trails) are necessary to make species‐specific seed transfer guidelines that account for climate trends while also considering the precise geographic origin of seed sources.

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